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Today, just before reading the Unit 9 material, I started making a plan to teach the present perfect tense to my adult conversation class next week. Imagine my surprise, then, when I stumbled upon a lesson plan on the present perfect tense right there in the reading! Before reading, my plan was to have a discussion about the students' travel experiences, elicit the present perfect tense, review participles and use them in example sentences, and play a game like "Never have I ever..."
As I was reading, I was glad to find the examples that compare the present perfect and the past simple, emphasizing that in the same discussion students will switch from one to the other: "Yes, I have been to Tokyo. I went there last month..." I'm going to try to use Unit 9's ideas next week, so I'm very glad to have found them.
Only one point in this unit and this test struck me as being more relative than we usually think: the idea that lesson plans shouldn't include specific things you're going to say. Of course, when I'm the only teacher, my lesson plans are more basic--as flexible as possible, so I can play off the class as much as possible. However, when I'm teaching with low-English-level teachers, I need to plan in much more detail. I need to make a note of exactly the point I need the teachers to help me make, exactly HOW we need to elicit a specific response from students at a specific time, etc. Essentially, I've realized that the detail in the lesson plans VERY much depends on who the students are AND who the teachers are.
I would argue that--especially in a language class when you want to maximize the students' exposure to specific grammar points, or when you want to be sure to use vocabulary the students know and/or need to review--a lesson should be planned in more detail than this material suggests.
